Oakland teachers demonstrated Thursday outside the construction site of OUSD’s new $57 million administrative center under construction on Union Street, arguing that the money should be used to repair classrooms instead.
The district’s wage proposal on the table includes a retrospective 10% increase and a one-time bonus of $5,000 for union members. In addition, each teacher receives a salary increase of at least 13% and even 22%.
The offer also cuts the time it takes teachers to get to the top of the pay scale from 32 years to 20 years.
But county officials continue to insist that the union’s proposals to tackle homelessness, use vacant lots and drought-tolerant landscaping should not be part of the negotiation process and are too expensive.
Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell said the teachers’ union would “trust the district with broader societal issues” that were outside their purview.
“While the district agrees that these issues should be addressed, and we are working on many of them, school district budgets alone cannot solve the problems. They are calling for multi-agency government support,” Johnson-Trammell said in a statement released by the district.
Meanwhile, the teachers claim the district has not held negotiations with them for seven months and that their public service demands include important modernizations for “dilapidated” school facilities that need immediate attention.
According to the teachers’ union, the district is spending millions on a new central administrative center instead of addressing pressing school safety issues.
“Educators wish to note that OUSD is spending $57 million from Measure Y funds on a project that will not directly benefit students or teachers on school sites,” the union said in a statement Wednesday night.
Measure Y, approved by ballot in 2020, allowed the district to issue $735 million in bonds to fund necessary improvements to schools and facilities throughout the district.
“OUSD has been guilty of massive administrative overspending for decades — external audits and reports have consistently confirmed this, but OUSD will not back down,” said Marika Iyer, a high school English and ethnology teacher. “It’s time to prioritize our students’ education, not more high-paying jobs and buildings we don’t need.”
The teachers’ union says Measure Y funds will be used to fix sanitation problems that are causing raw sewage to enter classrooms, heating and cooling upgrades, and removal of hazardous materials on campus sites that have reported elevated levels of contaminants in water and soil. could be used.
It would cost more than $1 billion to implement “common good” proposals called for by the striking Oakland teachers, school district officials said Wednesday night.
With 11 days left in the school year for 35,000 students in the district, the standoff between the Oakland Unified School District and the Oakland Education Association, which represents about 3,000 teachers and other staff, continues.
